Accepting change is hard.
It's the same reason old people are disgusted by young people talking loudly on mobile phones and why middle-aged people listen only to Paul Weller records and complain that modern music is 'just banging sounds'.
It's also why the idea of replacing our gaming PCs' hard drives with solid state drives seems like madness. The idea of a glorified memory card being better than several decades of established, reliable mechanical technology? Nonsense?
Unfortunately, the jig is up. The future is coming on quick and the venerable hard drive may not be able to stand against it. Over the last year, solid state storage has quietly established itself as a reliable mainstay in both netbooks like the Eee PC and in high-end laptops. The capacity may still be rock-bottom, but the Windows load times are frighteningly fast.
What's been slower is the crossover to desktops, as it's hard to take a full-size PC with less than 500GB of storage seriously. Now that the technology's a couple of generations along, the sort of speeds an SSD offers are frankly astonishing.
32GB, 64GB or even 128GB may seem like a miserably small amount of space, but bear in mind that Vista and its pagefile only needs about 20GB. That leaves room enough for your most played couple of games plus Office and Photoshop, all of which will enjoy dramatically quicker load times.
The rest of your stuff can lurk on a cheapie half-terabyte secondary hard drive. Soon enough, SSDs themselves will hit that half-terabyte mark, and noisy, sluggish HDDs will be a thing of the past.
SSDomination
That said, two factors keep SSDs from assuming immediate dominance.
First is price – a decent SSD, even a low capacity one, goes for the same amount of money as a mid-range or even high-end graphics card. The sort of component that could revolutionise your PC in other words, while even the best SSD will, realistically speaking, only offer some extra convenience.
That said, if your main system is a laptop and you genuinely use it on the move a lot, a good SSD – especially Intel's wonderful X25 – will dramatically change that system. There'll be far less of a load-up time and the lack of moving parts in a SSD means less battery drain and more sturdiness in your storage medium. The sooner all lappies tote a SSD, the better.
For desktops, though, we're still a few years off SSDs being a necessity. Fortunately, all the SSDs here will slot into either a laptop or a desktop, so long as you've got SATA rather than PATA drive connections.
The second thing to bear in mind is that the technology's still new, so performance can be all over the place. There are a lot of differences between drives, and nothing resembling price standardisation as yet. It's only with the most recent generation that these things have really found their feet, so shop carefully.
While the average speeds the Patriot Warp V.2 and OCZ Core Series demonstrate are spectacular, the exhaustive graphs behind those numbers show an awful lot of fluctuation: random latency spikes and read/write slowdowns meaning sustained, day-to-day performance won't be quite the revelation the numbers suggest.
The laughably expensive Intel X25, by contrast, is a whole lot more constant, generally keeping that incredible 220MB/s read speed sustained rather than wobbling all over the place. It's for precisely that reason that the X25 is so expensive, as Intel's gone to a lot of efforts with the firmware and controller to make it a cut above the rest.
Your comments (6) Click to add a new comment
sandisk
January 26th
6. The beginning of 2009 has brought changes to the market, in terms of more reliable and higher performance SSDs, almost five times faster than fastest HDD. As the market trend for declining flash prices continues, side by side with technological advancements, even large capacity SSDs are expected to cost less than HDDs.
SanDisk has created a website called the SSD Academy that offers consumers and professionals a lot of information on the SSD market as well as general flash usage. www.sandisk.com/ssd. There's also an educational video on SSD vs. HDD that add to the conversation. http://driveyourlaptop.com/video/ssd-vs-hdd
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barasawa
December 22nd 2008
5. Of course they aren't mentioning the biggest flaw of the SSDs. They still haven't overcome the limited write issues. Last I heard, each bit could only be written to about 100,000 times. With good managment software, that could actually last decades on the average laptop for the average user. With bad managment software, well, lets just say you'll be watching your available space dwindle... Nobody's going to be using SSDs for a file server any time in the near future.
Of course HDDs fail also, but for different reasons, and at different times.
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gary_davis
December 22nd 2008
4. I don't think that I have read such a flagrantly egregious article about SSDs versus HDDs since the subject became such a popular topic amongst (so called) tech writers. From the moment of reading the lurid title (by the way "coffin nails" suggest "done deal" or "case closed"..honestly can't you do better then misapply such a worn out metaphor) to the point you contradict yourself and the fait accompli suggested by that title by stating: "two factors keep SSDs from assuming immediate dominance" your article is the most plebian effort at writing in general and misreprents the facts so obviously that I think you must be a high school sophomore taking a holiday internship. If that is the case, I urge you to accept the advise that to write a story you can never do enough research and must do substantially more then you have obviously done. McKenzie's reply above gives you one story you should have read before you started writing this dreck. There are many more. Get someone to teach you how to use Google and do a little work before you assume to take up any of my time and attention. The only reason I read this one is because it was rather like driving by a car accident. There wasn't any way I could help myself from seeing who the bozo was that wrote a title as rediculous as this one.
Just one example demonstrating your gross lack of effort on this topic is that most market observers, including me, believe that SSDs will drop share of the nascent netbook market like a heavy rock in 2009. Nobody in that business wants to have an anchor around their neck in terms of cost, when addressing what is obviously a price sensitive market in extremely price sensitive times. Let me offer another little tip: spend some time researching SSDs in the enterprise. Then spend a little time research truly "universal memory". It ain't gonna be NAND flash designed to emulate a disk drive. Here is just one link to help you:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212501437
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mckenzme
December 22nd 2008
3. "the lack of moving parts in a SSD means less battery drain"
I'm not sure if I should believe this article or an article from a very trusted site (www.tomshardware.com) that refutes the idea that SSD's consume less power. I am leaning towards the tomshardware.com article....
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html
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ablebobby
December 22nd 2008
2. This comment has been deleted
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pete_l
December 21st 2008
1. > disgusted? old people? banging sounds?
The reason _people_ (of all ages, genders, creeds and colours) don't like idiots talking _loudly_ on mobile phones is because it's unnecessary, inconsiderate and we really don't want to know about their squalid, pathetic little lives (we have squalid, pathetic little lives of our own).
However, none of that has anything to do with SSDs, or Paul Weller for that matter. Given the truculent rant that start off the above story, it's hard to credit the writer with any credibility. They're probably correct, but I just don't want to read what they have top say.
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